The first day President Trump mentioned the coronavirus in public, only one American was known to be infected. He assured the rest of the country it had no reason to worry.
“We have it totally under control,”
Trump said Jan. 22 from Davos, Switzerland. “It’s going to be just fine.”
Behind the scenes, however, even some of his close aides thought the virus posed a much greater threat to the nation and to Trump.
Three months later,
the United States leads the world in reported numbers of people infected and killed by the virus, with more than 39,000 dead. States, counties and local hospitals are desperately
bidding against one another for scarce ventilators and other lifesaving equipment in a marketplace dominated by chaos, profiteering and fraud. And the country's economy is in free fall, with
more than 20 million Americans filing unemployment claims in the last month.
President Trump gives a thumbs-up Jan. 22 at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where he told an interviewer that the U.S. had the coronavirus "totally under control." (Fabrice Coffrini / AFP/Getty Images)
Trump has at various times called the catastrophe unforeseeable or
blamed the World Health Organization and China; his predecessor, who he claimed left him an "empty shelf" of medical equipment; and state governors whom
he accused of mismanaging the health crisis.
But from the first international reports of the virus’ appearance in China in late December until Trump
declared a nationwide emergency in mid-March, his administration
delayed or bungled basic but crucial steps to contain the spread of infections and prepare the country for a pandemic, according to a Times review of internal government records and interviews with administration officials and outside experts.
In that key early period, many of the Trump presidency’s most deeply ingrained characteristics — its distrust of the federal bureaucracy, internal personality conflicts, lack of a formal policymaking process and Trump’s own insistence on controlling the public message —
severely hampered the federal response, according to current and former White House officials and public health experts.
Even senior members of the administration who sought to warn Trump about the looming dangers were rebuffed, said several administration officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment on internal discussions.
Containing such an easily spread contagion was certain to be arduous under any circumstances, many experts concede. Making it even harder, China initially played down the infection danger, and it was unclear at that point how readily the virus could spread.
But Trump's unwillingness to take the health threat seriously and disagreements among his top aides effectively sidelined the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, leaving key responders without direction from a White House that was focused on the president's
impeachment trial in the Senate.
Weeks were lost that could have been used to test and isolate the first infected patients, purchase medical supplies, prepare makeshift hospitals and enlist corporations in quickly ramping up production of badly needed respirators and other supplies.
Medical workers treat a critical COVID-19 patient March 1 at a Red Cross hospital in Wuhan, China. (AFP/Getty Images)
“In an ideal world, there would have been a structure and someone with vision empowered in the White House,” said J. Stephen Morrison, a health policy expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank. “Everything was seen through the impeachment and reelection process.”
The White House said in a statement that Trump acted to control the virus while Democrats in Congress and the news media ignored the danger in January and February.
"President Trump took bold action to protect Americans and unleash the full power of the federal government to curb the spread of the virus, expand testing capacities, and expedite vaccine development when we had no true idea the level of transmission or asymptomatic spread," White House spokesman Judd Deere said.
The statement added that Trump "remains completely focused on the health and safety of the American people and it is because of his bold leadership that we will emerge from this challenge healthy, stronger, and with a prosperous and growing economy."
'It will cost the election'
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The first official warning about the new virus came on the last day of 2019, when Chinese authorities reported that residents of Wuhan in the central Hubei province
were coming down with pneumonia from an unknown cause. China soon identified the cause of the outbreak as a new strain of coronavirus but said there was “no evidence of significant human-to-human transmission.”
At the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Director Robert Redfield, a physician and former AIDS researcher, tweeted Jan. 14 that “there is no confirmed person-to-person spread” of the illness in China, though his agency was “monitoring the situation closely.” The CDC issued a routine “level 1 travel notice,” advising Americans traveling to Wuhan to “practice usual precautions.”
Three days later,
the CDC announced that airports would conduct health screenings for passengers traveling from Wuhan to Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York.
The screenings didn’t initially cover all airports with flights from China. Nor did they address travelers from Europe, another likely source of infection. And the cursory temperature checks didn’t detect patients who were carrying the virus but were still asymptomatic, a problem that became fully apparent only later.
Travelers pass through the Tom Bradley International Terminal at LAX on March 15 amid heightened U.S. travel restrictions. (Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
At the White House, Trump and his close advisors, consumed by his impending impeachment trial in the Senate, rebuffed attempts by Redfield's boss, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, to alert them about the threat, according to a former federal official with knowledge of the communications.
Unlike some other Trump Cabinet officials, Azar has considerable experience in his field, having served in the agency in the administration of President George W. Bush and having been an executive at pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly and Co.
His relationship with Trump and senior health and budget officials in the White House had been strained for months, in part because of Azar’s inability to deliver on one of Trump’s signature campaign promises — to lower prescription drug prices. Trump also blamed Azar for entangling him in what turned out to be a politically complicated effort to
crack down on vaping.
The health secretary finally connected with Trump on Jan. 18, when the president was at Mar-a-Lago, his Palm Beach, Fla., resort. By then, Thailand and Japan were reporting confirmed coronavirus infections. Trump wanted to discuss
the vaping ban, not the coronavirus, a White House aide familiar with the call said.
Two days later, the CDC confirmed the first coronavirus case in the U.S.
A Washington state man in his 30s had returned from Wuhan on Jan. 15 at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, where no screening was being conducted. Later, he reported pneumonia-like symptoms to his doctor.
“It’s one person coming in from China,” Trump said during his
Jan. 22 interview with CNBCfrom Davos.
A traveler wearing a mask waits at Los Angeles International Airport on March 18. (Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times)
As Trump reassured the nation, the WHO, the United Nations agency for international public health, announced that evidence suggested
“human to human” transmission in China but that more investigation was necessary.
Trump did not consider the virus a major worry and trusted Azar to handle it, a senior administration official said. Other White House aides were concerned that Azar would overreact, the official and another senior White House aide added.
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In late January, Joseph Grogan, the White House domestic policy chief and a former lobbyist for a pharmaceutical company, sounded the alarm about the administration potentially overlooking what could become a major crisis. He voiced reservations about Azar's ability to handle the matter during a meeting in the office of Mick Mulvaney, then the president's acting chief of staff, one of the senior administration officials said.
"It could be so big that if we mishandle it, it will cost the election," Grogan said with several senior staffers present.
Mulvaney convened meetings aimed at coordinating the U.S. government response, but the discussion at first focused only on
evacuation flights to bring Americans in China and other affected countries home, one of the senior White House officials said. There was little discussion about how to keep the virus out.
Daily intelligence updates from the CIA and other intelligence organizations tracked the international spread of the coronavirus, but their reports did not recommend steps to contain it in the U.S., according to a senior Defense official familiar with the warnings.
On Jan. 29, the White House
announced a 12-member task force of officials from multiple agencies “to work to prevent the spread of the new coronavirus.” Trump was briefed in the White House Situation Room.
Privately, some advisors were warning about massive disruptions if the virus caused a pandemic. Peter Navarro, Trump’s director of trade and manufacturing policy, suggested stopping travel from China
in a memo written the same day the task force was announced. The memo, first reported by the New York Times, warned of potentially devastating effects on the economy if no containment measures were taken.
But Navarro, a longtime China hawk known around the West Wing as having a combustible temper, was largely dismissed after he erupted at Azar during a staff meeting, leading the health secretary to demand that Mulvaney keep him off the task force, according to one of the senior administration officials.
The conflicts inside the White House along with the impeachment trial underway in the Senate kept the health threat barely on Trump’s radar.
"You have Trump as the lone-wolf operator," said Anthony Scaramucci, who served briefly as Trump's director of communications and has recently been critical of the president. "What happens is everybody gets immobilized. They don't know what their marching orders are … so that's caused them to be very slow-footed in the midst of this crisis."
Others in the administration took their cue from Trump.
The same day as the Situation Room briefing, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross observed that the alarming rise in cases in China could “accelerate the return of jobs to North America."
White House counselor Kellyanne Conway told reporters the next day that Trump and his senior aides were continuing "to monitor the situation." Standing next to her, Brett Giroir, assistant secretary for health, said that the outbreak was "under control" and that "all the resources were in place."
As head of the task force, Azar tried to carve out a major role overseeing the federal response without sounding public alarms that were sure to upset the president, according to another administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.